XFX 7600GS Lockups

[adehh]

Hi I made a support ticket regarding this card 2 days ago and I haven't had a reply yet. I reported that the card was overheating but I have recently discovered that the issue could well not be down to overheating.

I'm using the 7600GS in a P4 631 with an Abit AL8-V motherboard, before the 7600GS was installed I had a Gainward 7900GT which has been moved to another machine, no problems were encountered with the 7900GT so I can safely say that the 7600GS is at fault here and not the rest of the hardware.

The card causes problems when playing any games including CSS, FEAR Combat and Call of Juarez symptoms normally begin with artifacting and then a crash. I have also been replicating the fault using rthdribl whereby the card runs for a good 5-10minutes at 72c and then eventually crashes for no apparent reason at all, this is the reason I don't think it is down to overheating. Rthdribl is great by the way, it uses complex shaders and HDR effects in a window so you can easily monitor temperatures on a graphics card while it's under heavy load.

Only problem is I bought the card back in September, and it wasn't installed until around 2 weeks ago so I've been late in discovering this issue - question is, am I too late for the Scan RMA process and will I need to go to XFX about this instead?

I have been looking around and have found a number of other users who have been having trouble with the XFX 7600GS, but also having trouble with the 7600GS from other manufacturers mostly with the AGP variation however.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=15664
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s...9062&hl=7600gs
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=858433 - this guy has exactly the same problem I'm seeing.

I also just found this in the Windows event viewer:

The driver nv4_disp for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I have tried the latest Nvidia drivers on this and some old ones that shouldnt really support the 7600GS, thing is the old drivers seemed to cause a different set of results and the machine didn't reboot like other times, it just went into a locked state.

Thank you.

[nope]

Are you playing them at high resolution?

The games you have mentioned are very very very demanding and I think you would have difficulty with a P4 631 , bring the resolution down then try after that.

[adehh]

I run all games on the 7600GS at 1024x768 because I knew the card won't handle anything higher, but that's beside the point. I shouldn't have to bring the resolution down on any card to prevent it crashing, games should run slow on high resolutions at the worst. The P4 is fine, it spent a good 6months keeping up with a 7900GT until I realised how much of a bottleneck it was on the 7900GT, the 7600GS is at least at the same level as the P4 now.

Thanks for the reply.

[nope]

I have tried quite a few cards and from my experiance this does happen.

The dual core does take this problem away, also having applications at the back running hogs a lot of the cpu's resources and this then becomes a problem and the Kernel cant take it and then locks up.

7600gs is quite powerful for P4 , if it was a dual core I wouldn't have said this to you , what is the speed of your CPU anyway?

Also you have stated that it happens more with the AGP , maybe its the limited bandwidth and it needs more to free the data from being bottlenecked.

Also I am sorry to tell you but it working on high resolution is the problem. I had a problem with my 7950GX2 when I was running it at 1800 res on far cry when I had a single core cpu but now its dual core and it doesnt have the problem of that happening. This way even though the programs dont take advantage of the dual core they still distribute the threads of the Windows xp to one core and one core to the game . This belive it or not makes the difference.

Try this , when you are about to play a game first end processes which you dont need from the background, you can do this by going to task manger or Run >msconfig> start up . You can free up resources so your ram and your cpu can keep up with the 7600gs.

Also try different resolutions and and take of things like antialiasing which taxes the gpu a lot. I have had problems with 6600gt sli and in single , also a 7600gs agp and it is mostly due to this , too much work and the resources are not thee to do the work.

Also old mobo,s have less IRQ's than new mobo's this can be a problem for gaming cos the resources are dedicated to othere things and you want them for the game, whilst new mobo's are capable and have more bandwidth better resources ,more data ,address lines .

[adehh]

It's a 3ghz Cedar Mill, the last of the P4s that went into production. Point is I was running a 7900GT on this for months with no problems which is easily two/three times more powerful than a 7600GS.

This 7600GS isn't just crashing in full screen applications however, I was running Rthdribl on it in windowed mode and it crashes after 5-10minutes.

[nope]

window mode is hogging a fair bit you know , it has more windows application running.
Also that is what I am saying to you , may be now your CPU is bottlenecked by the GPU.

[adehh]

I know exactly what your saying, but a CPU bottleneck should not be causing the machine to crash, I'm going to be testing this card in a Conroe E6600 on Sunday so we will see then.

[nope]

Also as you have said it might be driver related then your next hope is a driver fix for it.

One last thing before you go and do that , do you still have your 7900gt ? if so I would overclock your p4 which is very overclockable and get your last few years out of it and match it with the GTso your 7900gt will be free and wont be bottlenecked.

[adehh]

Discovered what the problem is, it's nothing to do with the P4, nothing to do with the drivers and plenty to do with the 7600GS. It's overheating for sure.

Recently mounted an 80mm fan right next to the card, the fan is holding the temperature at 52c and the card isn't crashing at all, seems that the card has trouble maintaining stability over 60c.

A card that overheats out of the box isn’t acceptable; the system is well ventilated and has 2 80mm intake fans with a 120mm extract fan on the PSU and an 80mm extract fan supplementing the PSU.

I need a reply from Scan on this issue to see what options I have with replacing the card for one that has an active cooling solution. I don’t see why I should have to go out and buy a VGA cooler for it when it shouldn’t overheat out of the box.

[adehh]

Could someone from Scan please look into why I've not had a reply to my RMA request?


Thanks.

[adehh]

Just tried the 7600GS in an Abit AW9D-MAX, Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2GB of Corsair XMS2 - exactly the same problem, card crashes after about 15minutes of gaming, and 10minutes of running rthdribl - crashed at 69c, room tempurature was 23-26c as indicated by an Akasa Fan Controller. Trouble is, when Scan check this using PC Mark 05 I think it may last for the duration without crashing, the card has to reach the high 60s before it crashes.

[jackofalltrades]

id try and phone them up if you can...best for getting a quick reply?
i also had/have the xfx 7600gs (PCIe), it overheated straight out of the box like yours, and i had it rma'd. unfortunately they just replaced it with another 7600gs, and im now having problems with this, but annoyingly i also wasnt able to install it until 2 weeks after it arrived. i sent a query to scan, but i didnt recieve a confirmation e-mail so i dont know whats going on there, gonna try and phone them 2moro.
will let y'all know how it goes.
also, i dont know this time round whether to avoid just this model, or avoid nvidia cardsand go for ati :s i really cant afford to recieve another dodgy card

[adehh]

By all means avoid XFX and fanless cards, but NVIDIA offer the best mid-range graphics chips at the mo. I'm going to have to see if I can have it refunded rather than replaced and get a 7600GT with a fan.

I've seen some prompt replies on here from the Scan people, but it looks like I shall have to phone them.